


Three Kisses

by Fay (Citrine)



Category: Les Misérables (2012), Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: M/M, Slash, canon character death(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-02-20
Updated: 2013-02-20
Packaged: 2017-11-29 22:39:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 869
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/692330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Citrine/pseuds/Fay
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three kisses and three witnesses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Three Kisses

**Author's Note:**

> Just a little piece I pulled together fairly quickly. I hope that you enjoy it.

Grantaire slid down the barricade until he crouched next to Marius on the hard earth. 

“I was drunk,” said Grantaire, “and I kissed him for a wager.”

The wine shop was in front of them, but Marius hadn’t seen Grantaire in there today. It hadn’t looked like that kind of kiss. Not like a drunken bet or a dare. It was the way Marius would have kissed Cosette, if Cosette hadn’t been so innocent. It was the way Eponine would like him to kiss her, although he never had. 

“It’s not what we’re fighting for,” said Marius. The hard wood of a broken door dug into his back.

Grantaire shrugged. “Why not? Why is it different to any other freedom?”

“We can fight to overturn the laws of men, but not those of God or nature.”  Marius tried to find the right words to express the unease and the distaste that he felt. “That’s different. We can’t fly in the face of heaven.”

Grantaire laughed. “Try telling that to my fallen angel.”  He scraped a pattern in the dirt with the toe of his boot. “It’s no different you know, no different to you and Cosette.”

“Of course it’s different, it’s abhorrent.”  Marius pretended not to see the pain that flared in Grantaire’s eyes. He got up and walked away, trying to outpace his own irrational guilt. His friends talked of freedom, of liberty and equality, but there were limits to their tolerance. He didn’t tell anyone what he had seen.

*

Gavroche was a child of the streets and childhood was something that happened to other people. He had no memory of home or family.  His mother had probably been a pox-ridden whore who had abandoned him as soon as he could crawl.

“Sleep on the hearth,” Enjolras said on the night of the blizzard.

Gavroche would have refused anyone else. It felt strange and wrong to be indoors with a cushion under his head. He slept badly even before Grantaire stumbled in waving a bottle and singing.  He almost fell over Gavroche and ruffled his hair as if he were a child, not a little man.

“Why’s the boy here?” Grantaire asked Enjolras. Then he giggled. “It doesn’t matter. I’m too drunk to perform.”

Grantaire fell onto the narrow bed beside Enjolras.  It didn’t take long for his snores to fill the room. Gavroche watched through fake-closed eyes. Enjolras pulled Grantaire’s boots off and dragged the bedcovers up over them both.  Firelight glinted on his golden hair. He lowered his head and kissed Grantaire’s slack lips.

The priest would have said that it was wicked and wrong, but Gavroche had seen worse. He wasn’t going to tell anyone, not ever.  Enjolras had drawn Grantaire’s head onto his shoulder and he too had drifted off to sleep. Gavroche yawned. It was nice here, all cosy in front of the fire. This must be what it was like to have a home and a family.

*

Eponine might have betrayed them out of jealousy. It cut her heart to the quick to see them against the alley wall. Enjolras’ hands tangled in Grantaire’s dark curls. His face cupped in Grantaire’s hands as they kissed. She watched them in bitterness and envy. Afterwards she wondered if Enjolras had seen her before she merged into the black shadows.

If he had he gave no sign, not when she came to the wine shop the next day or when she arrived at the barricade in male clothes.

“This is no place for women,” was all that he said.

That was why she had put on men’s clothes and men’s freedoms. Enjolras would have said that they were all enslaved, but women’s shackles were stronger and heavier than those men had to bear.

“If I were a boy would you kiss me against the alley wall?” She had never wanted beautiful Enjolras to kiss her.

 His eyes smoked over for a moment, a heartbeat of doubt and fear. “No,” he said. “My heart is pledged to Grantaire.”

“And mine to Marius, but he does not love me. No one has ever loved me.”  She turned towards the barricade. “I envy you.”

She sat on the ground with her back to the hard wooden door. If she lived through this she would still be unwanted and unloved. They moved together, Enjolras and Grantaire, climbing high above her on the barricade. She could bring them down with a single word as sure and deadly as a bullet.  

Eponine would take their secret to her grave.

*

Marius saw the bodies laid out and the blood that ran across the cobbles, but he did not see them die. He only had the second hand story of their execution from a woman who had peeped out from behind her shutters.

Enjolras brave and noble to the last. Grantaire had chosen to die with him. A smile and a handclasp before the guns had cut them down. Men do not die for lust. They die for noble causes and for love.

“They loved one another,” he told Cosette. “In that they were no different to us.”

Marius saw her blank expression and he knew that she didn’t understand, but he did.  


End file.
